The Political Implications Of Kinship Intensity

The phrase “kinship intensity” is rare in the behavioural science literature, but it’s making a resurgence thanks to new understandings of genetics. Although the concept of kinship intensity has been thoroughly elaborated upon with regards to mate selection, its inevitable profound impact on our political philosophy has yet to occur. This essay gives a foretaste.

Kinship is the primary organising principle of human societies. The reasons for this have been described at length by evolutionary psychologists and by biologists in works such as The Selfish Gene. In short, kinship organises societies because organisms that co-operate socially are more likely to survive and to reproduce than ones who don’t.

The great political philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Chanakya, Machiavelli and Hobbes didn’t know about genes, and so they had no concept of kinship intensity. Aristotle was aware that families organised into villages, and villages into provinces, and provinces into nations, but he didn’t know that it was kin selection on the basis of shared genes that drove all of that.

Back in the old days, before the Age of Exploration and mass transit, almost everyone lived in a state of high kinship intensity. Most people only knew a couple of hundred other people from their village and a few regional luminaries like the local sheriff or priest. Virtually everyone was related to each other in some way. They celebrated each others’ weddings and birthdays all the time.

In the modern world, most people live in a low state of kinship intensity. Living in big cities, many people encounter strangers all day – not only people from other tribes but from other countries and continents. In big cities, one comes into contact with people whose natural behaviour is so different to one’s own that it seems alien.

This change – from medieval to modern – has had profound effects on our political attitudes.

When a society has a high degree of kinship intensity, people are much more generous and co-operative. It’s logical to be, because any given act of kindness is more likely to benefit someone like you. If many of your kin live in the same society, it makes sense to work towards the betterment of that society, perhaps even making sacrifices for it. Your kin will benefit, and will reciprocate.

When a society has a low degree of kinship intensity, people are much less generous and co-operative. This is also logical, because acts of kindness cost the same amount to perform but will benefit someone unlike you, who is unlikely to reciprocate it. If you’re the only one of your kin in a society, there’s very little reason to work hard to better that society.

The West has always been split into a high kinship intensity Old World and a low kinship intensity New World. As mass immigration continues, the kinship intensity of all societies in the West will continue to fall: the Old World will become like the New and the New World will become like Brazil. This will have predictable consequences for human political behaviour.

As the degree of kinship intensity in Western countries continues to fall, people will care less and less about the people on the bottom of society. Once rich people no longer have much in common with poor people, those rich people will stop wanting to pay taxes or donate to charities that help. Decreasing kinship intensity will inevitably lead to both lower taxes and a corporate mentality where other people are viewed as tools to generate profit, and not as human beings.

If the people you’re exploiting aren’t related to you, then who cares?

The more diversity there is in a society, the more willing people in that society are to exploit others. People tend to enslave outsiders if they can, rather than their neighbours. The Barbary Coast slave traders raided Europe for slaves; the plantation owners of the American South bought theirs from Africa. African slaves constitute the largest proportion of slaves traded today, mostly by Arabs.

By contrast, the societies with the least amount of exploitation are the homogenous ones. Japan, South Korea and Scandinavia are characterised by being high-trust, low-crime societies where people habitually contribute to the common good. Societies like these, with high degrees of kinship intensity, are like large families.

We can see from this that kinship intensity predicts a number of outcomes. The higher it is, the less within-group exploitation there is. The lower it is, the greater within-group exploitation there is.

Kinship intensity predicts outcomes such as weight of taxation. In societies with high kinship intensity (like Scandinavia), people are generally happy to pay high taxes, knowing that the tax money will benefit their kin. In societies with low kinship intensity (like America), people don’t want to pay any taxes, because they feel that the tax money will benefit those who aren’t their kin.

It follows logically, therefore, that lowering the kinship intensity of a society through means such as mass immigration will make people less willing to contribute to the greater good. This apparent selfishness makes perfect sense from a kin selection perspective, and will obtain until intermarriage makes the newcomers the same kin as everyone else (or until there is civil war).

So anyone who wants to have a culture in which people contribute to the greater good, instead of exploiting it, better support policies that maintain a high level of kinship intensity. Crucial to this objective is limiting immigration to a level at which the newcomers can be absorbed into the kin networks of the existing population, rather than forming their own parallel networks.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Writing Characters Of Gold

The highest possible spiritual level is the element of gold. This represents perfection. Gold is the most precious of the metals known to the ancients. As such, its presence had the greatest influence on their behaviour. Gold is very much the fulcrum around which the world turns, and for this it has long been worshipped.

In the ancient world, gold represented the Sun, the life-giving force. The Sun was also worshipped by all of the ancients at some point or other, most notably in the Roman cult of Sol Invictus. This was due to the realisation that if the Sun did not return to the world after the Winter Solstice then all life on Earth would perish.

In an alchemical sense, gold represents God. The uppermost pole of the alchemical spectrum belongs to God, and the raising up of any of the lesser elements is to imbue them with God’s energy. Characters of gold, then, are divine. Characters of mercury might be messengers of God’s will, but characters of gold are direct expressions of it.

Viewed metaphysically, a character of gold is every bit as important to the world as the light of the Sun. Without the moral rectitude afforded by the character of gold, the human race would regress into a pre-civilised state. We would go back to being animals, God’s light being entirely absent. The characters of gold, and their messengers in the characters of mercury, are the force that imposes moral order upon the world.

The real power of the element of gold is its subtlety. Being perfect, it need not use any force or coercion. It is already in accordance with the Will of God, and consequently it acts without resistance. Its power is exemplified in the fable of Aesop, in which the Sun and the wind compete to induce a man to take off his coat. The Sun wins, because its gentle power does not inspire resistance.

The essential characteristic of characters of gold is radiance. Whereas the characters of silver are learned and the characters of mercury brilliant, the characters of gold radiate a divinity that comes from a consciousness that is perfectly attuned to the Will of God. They are wise – a quality that is not appreciated by all, although all benefit from it.

This radiance will set all of the other characters in their presence at ease. Being around a character of gold will incline the anxious to calmness, the angry to peace and the lustful to temperance. The ambitious characters of mercury will switch to enjoying their lives rather than exulting themselves. This is the power of the character of gold – to create peace.

In contrast to the characters of iron, who dominate with physical force, and to the characters of silver, who dominate with psychological force, the characters of gold dominate with spiritual force. They have no need to twist other characters’ arms or trick them with contracts; they influence the world by living in accordance with the Tao. This causes other characters to look up to them.

A character of gold will be one that other characters tend to speak about very fondly. This is a reflection of the generous personal warmth that the characters of gold exude. The character of gold will recognise the gold in others. As such, it will feel good to be around them.

The greatest motivation of the character of gold is to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings. This is true to a lesser extent of the characters of mercury, silver and copper, but only the character of gold represents the perfect expression of this. The character of gold wants for nothing more than an end to the suffering in the world, and they are happy to put themselves second to this goal.

Gold is the most malleable of all metals. This softness is one of its prime characteristics. A character of gold will seldom be prickly, bad-tempered, abusive or impatient. If directly insulted, they will be extremely slow to take offence or to show anger. This may not work out to their advantage when other characters, interpreting the situation through their own base lens, come to think them weak.

This malleability is such that, in the physical word, one gram of pure gold can be beaten into a sheet one square metre in size. That the tiniest piece of gold can create something that shines so brightly captures the essence of metaphysical gold. The smallest amount of it is potentially enough to completely upend the order of the world.

Concomitant with this softness is a reluctance to cause divisions or separations. However, gold is still a metal, and still has enough of an edge to cut if necessary.

The ability to expand itself beyond the capabilities of the other elements is reflective of the ability of characters of gold to see the bigger picture. A character of gold will never be motivated by short-term instincts. They have perfected themselves to the degree that impulses not in accordance with their true will no longer arise.

Characters of gold, despite their glorious radiance, are entirely capable of being destroyed by the envy of baser characters. Characters of iron can run a sword through them; characters of silver can destroy their social standing. In no sense are characters of gold superheroes with special powers. They are simply people of a higher spiritual frequency to all the others.

A character of gold can be of any age. Young or old doesn’t matter because alchemical gold is an expression of the spirit. As long as they are good, they are gold. In practice, a character is more likely to be of the gold if they are either very young or very old, because the former will not have been corrupted yet and the latter will have entire lives to mine for wisdom.

In practice, it will be almost impossible to portray a character of gold with true accuracy if the author themselves are not of the gold. This doesn’t matter, as long as the reader can be induced to believe that the character of gold is perfect.

Perhaps the closest example fiction has seen to a character of gold is that of Michael Valentine in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. A modern real life example might be Jiddu Krishnamurti, an ancient one Socrates.

A character of gold in your story might be a legend that informs your story world, rather than an actual character that appears and speaks lines. They might be the legendary founder of the state in which your protagonist resides, someone whose perfection has created a space for an entire nation to thrive.

A character of gold might otherwise be someone who only makes a fleeting appearance, and that to change the direction that a character or the story is going in. Like Gandalf in Lord of The Rings, they appear to move the other characters in the direction of absolution.

Characters of gold have warm feelings towards characters of all of the baser elements, but they have a special fondness for the characters of mercury, who are their messengers. Characters of gold are often in opposition to characters of silver or below, on account of that the latter are frequently acting under the influence of baser instincts.

This article is from Viktor Hellman’s The Alchemy of Character Development, the sixth book in VJM Publishing’s Writing With Psychology series. This book will show you how to use alchemy to create deep, realistic and engaging characters for your creative fiction.

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Debunking The “Structural Racism” Conspiracy Theory

The most prevalent conspiracy theory of our time is so prevalent that it’s accepted as truth by most media entities. This theory has it that black and brown academic and economic underachievement can best be explained by structural racism and white supremacy. The truth is that, like most conspiracy theories, this theory goes directly against the relevant science, and can be disproven by it.

When 9/11 happened, a popular conspiracy theory said it was an inside job. One particular version claimed that, as the melting point of steel is higher than the burning point of jet fuel, the twin towers could not have collapsed on account of being struck by aeroplanes (the official explanation). They had to have been taken down by explosives placed within the structure of the buildings.

The way to refute this theory was to ask people qualified in the relevant science. You could say to a civil engineer or a physicist “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” and they would tell you that it doesn’t have to melt the beams, it just has to heat them up enough so that they become too soft to support the weight of the building, at which point it will collapse. This is what happened in the case of the twin towers. Conspiracy theory debunked.

Anyone wanting to test other conspiracy theories can do likewise. If you want to know whether the Earth is flat you could ask an astronomer. If you wanted to know whether the Earth was 6,000 years old you could ask a geologist. If you wanted to know whether humans landed on the Moon you could ask an aeronautical engineer. And if you wanted to test whether the structural racism conspiracy theory was bullshit, you could ask a psychologist.

This is what a psychologist would tell you.

The science of IQ is the most robust and heavily supported of any social science. There is more evidence backing the validity of it than there is backing anything else. Most importantly, IQ also has more predictive power than any single other variable known to Psychology.

If you disagree about its predictive power, consider the following analogy.

You have two 13-year old boys. One is tested to have an IQ of 115, i.e. one standard deviation above average. The other is tested to have an IQ of 85, one standard deviation below average. The two boys are followed up ten years after the test. Without knowing which boy is which, you’re told that one has recently completed an accounting degree, whereas the other dropped out of school and drifted into petty crime.

Can you guess which is which?

Almost everyone would guess that the boy with an IQ of 115 became the accountant. And, in the vast majority of such cases, they’d be right. Accountancy is intellectually challenging: far more accountants have IQs closer to 115 than to 85. Likewise, far more petty criminals have IQs closer to 85 than to 115. Almost everyone knows this, and almost no-one questions it.

The fact is that IQ is so powerfully predictive that we can already get a rough idea of how a person’s life will turn out just from accurately measuring their IQ. The average person with an IQ of 85 will have much greater trouble learning and recalling information than the average person with an IQ of 100. Their impulse control, measured by ability to delay gratification, will be significantly inferior.

Because their intellectual ability and their discipline are poorer than than of the average person, they will be less able to meet the demands of the modern workplace. As such, they will be marginalised into unemployment and underemployment more often. Any population of people with an average IQ of 85 will be much poorer and much more criminal than any population with an IQ of 100 or higher.

85 is also the average IQ of black Americans and Pacific Islanders, with Maoris being slightly higher (around 90). This we know from the research compiled by researchers like Richard Lynn in books like Race Differences in Intelligence.

Psychological science, therefore, can predict on the basis of IQ alone that black Americans and brown Kiwis will be poorer and will be more involved in the criminal justice system than white Americans and white Kiwis. This can be confidently predicted even in the total absence of structural racism or white supremacy.

At this point, a believer in the structural racism conspiracy theory will argue that structural racism not only makes blacks and browns poorer and more likely to be involved with the criminal justice system, but it also makes their IQs lower on account of things like teachers ignoring them more often during class or discouraging them from study. Therefore, even if they do have lower IQs, it’s still white people’s fault.

For one thing, we know that this contention can’t be true because intelligence is mostly genetic and not environmental. Although the environment can have a powerful effect on the intelligence of young people, the effect of environment on IQ is no more than 0.2 by adulthood – a phenomenon known as the Wilson Effect. Therefore, low adult IQ is primarily a genetic phenomenon.

For another thing, we can observe the experience and outcomes of other racial groups who have similar IQs to white people.

105 is the average IQ of Far East Asians. The structural racism conspiracy theory would predict that Far East Asians do worse than white people, on account of that white people deny them opportunities for advancement and discriminate against them in business and politics. After all, white supremacists don’t like Asians any more than they like blacks.

The psychological science theory would predict that Far East Asians do as well or better than white people, on account of that their high IQs lead to successful careers and less criminality. Being high IQ and having good impulse control, they should study hard and get decent jobs.

As it turns out, Asian Americans earn 7% more than whites at the median. They are also significantly less criminal, despite that more of them are from poor families and many are even refugees. This directly refutes the structural racism conspiracy theory and directly supports the psychological science theory.

Ultimately, the main reason why blacks do worse than whites in America, and the main reason why browns do worse than whites in New Zealand, is because of low IQ. This low IQ leads them to make more impulsive decisions, which leads to poverty. This isn’t at all controversial among those who have studied the relevant science.

The conspiracy theory that says blacks and browns do worse because of white racism is bullshit. This means that the poorer outcomes of blacks and browns cannot be explained by white racism, but by factors inherent to the blacks and browns themselves.

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Clown World Chronicles: Who Is Waifu?

The suffering of Clown World brings with it great longing. Some people long for respite, others long for vengeance, others long simply for the warm embrace of a devoted wife. Those in the latter category might find themselves pining for the sweet touch of Waifu, one of the Elders of the Clown World pantheon.

As has been described earlier in this book, relations between men and women are at an all-time low. Not only is distrust and misunderstanding between them worse than ever, but young people are having less sex than ever.

This lack of positive relations with the opposite sex – one of the most fundamental pleasures in life – is one of the leading causes of the resentment that exists in Clown World. Worst of all, these poor relations aren’t primarily the result of autism or social fashion – they’re a function of will.

Many men feel that women are now hopelessly degenerate – that they’ve all turned into some kind of roastie. As such, they don’t want to be involved with the average woman. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to devote energy to a relationship with a woman who only wants to drink booze and who will leave you as soon as she gets bored. As such, many men have dropped out of the dating game – but their basic desire for female companionship has not abated.

This combination of feelings has led men to lust after their idea of a perfect woman, the opposite of the roastie. This is the Waifu.

Not being promiscuous, Waifu is deeply devoted to the one man. She is not at all interested in the “cock carousel”. Waifu doesn’t go out drinking with the girls. She’s more interested in social bonding for the sake of creating the perfect family. Her baking skills are more sophisticated than her cock sucking skills.

Waifu relates to Stacy as the Elder Goddess of the Positive Feminine Axis relates to the Younger One. Whereas Stacy is the unrealised positive feminine, Waifu is the realised form. Stacy has the potential to develop into a Waifu or to jump on the carousel and become a roastie. In Waifu, the waveform has collapsed into perfection.

Because so many men have withdrawn from the world to watch anime and to play video games, a large number of them have encountered idealised versions of female companions in those media. Naturally, many of those men come to fantasise about having some of these ideal women as real-life companions. Collectively, these ideal females form the spirit of Waifu.

‘Waifu’ is just a transliteration into Japanese of the English word ‘wife’. It comes from the idea that women in Far East Asia are more devoted, and far less degenerate, than their Western counterparts. Whether or not this is true, there are many Western men who have imagined themselves happy together with an ideal woman.

Waifu is the essence of all of these perfect fantasy wives, distilled into one divine form. She is the Elder Goddess of the Positive Feminine Axis because she represents the ideal feminine in its perfected form, i.e. as a self-actualised version of Stacy. Waifu is the natural companion of Boomer, who is able to sit back and chill thanks to Waifu’s devoted care.

In practice, there are two Waifus: a Western one and an Eastern one.

The Western one is known as the Tradwife. She is usually portrayed as a female Wojak variant, with lustrous blonde hair and wearing a blue dress with a daisy pattern. Sometimes the trad Waifu is depicted as Bavarian or Swiss, the idea being that these places have escaped the moral decay that has afflicted the Anglosphere.

The Eastern one is like the one shown on the waifu pillow in the image at the top of the page. This one is black-haired, usually Japanese, and inevitably depicted in anime form. She is usually blushing, being so wholesome that she considers it improper for another man to gaze upon her.

Many men feel that Clown World has cost them the opportunity to have a Waifu of their own. Much of the rage directed at society comes from this perceived loss. However, these men mostly don’t understand that relations between men and women have always been tough. Lysistrata proves that things were challenging even at the peak of Western civilisation.

This is why the common longing for a return to the 1950s is mistaken. For one thing, 1950s devotion was forced in many ways, which brought with it a great deal of resentment. This was often masked with drinking: 1950s relationships involved a great deal of alcohol and violence. A return to the 1950s would also require that males conform to 1950s workplace expectations, which no-one really wants.

For another thing, attracting a devoted wife is primarily a matter of demonstrating sufficient rectitude oneself. Regardless of how corrupt one’s environment is, there are always men and women who have enough spiritual fortitude to express themselves despite their surroundings. Those who are best able to do this are the gods of the Clown World pantheon.

The spirit of Waifu will always exist, and will always be worshipped, as long as there are men who are unable to find real-life women who can meet their emotional needs. And, even if they do she will still be worshipped, because those real-life women will appear to them as avatars of Waifu herself.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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